The present invention is directed towards a character entry system and method for electronic devices, particularly small mobile devices such as wireless communications devices.
There is generally a need to keep the size of portable electronic devices such as personal wireless communications devices small so that the devices can be worn on the body of the user or otherwise easily carried by the user. As a result, the input mechanism for the portable communications device needs to be small and have a minimal number of keys optimized for use with a minimal number of keystrokes. An example of a hand-held electronic device having a keyboard optimized for use with the thumbs is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,396,482 issued May 28, 2002, to Griffin et. al. and assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
In written communication, there are a number of special characters that are typically “paired” or “twinned” with other characters. For example, left or bracket characters such as “<”; “(“;”{”; and “[” are typically paired with respective right bracket characters “>”; “)”; “}” and “]”, with the left and right bracket characters (also often referred to as open and close brackets, respectively) enclosing other characters. Similarly, quote characters (“) are typically paired together enclosing other characters. In the compressed physical keyboard designs or virtual on-screen keyboard designs of portable electronic devices, entry of such characters can be cumbersome and may require a sequence of entry steps to be taken for each character. Additionally, in a problem not just limited to portable devices, users frequently forget to include the closing or right character of a character pair. There are also situations when an opening sequence of characters is paired with a closing sequence of characters with information nested between. For example HTML source code is structured using paired opening and closing sequences as: <HEAD> opening character sequence paired with the </HEAD> closing sequence, or opening <TITLE> paired with closing </TITLE>, or <TABLE> with </TABLE>.
Thus, there is a need for a method and system that optimizes user input of commonly used character pairs or character sequence pairs, particularly in the context of mobile communications devices.